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Faith and Politics
Pope Francis, in his foreword, states that one of the major themes in the thought of Joseph Ratzinger is the relationship between faith and politics: "His firsthand experience of Nazi totalitarianism led him even as a young student to reflect on the limits of obedience to the state for the sake of the liberty of obeying God."; In support of this, he quotes from one of Ratzinger's texts presented in this volume: "The state is not the whole of human existence and does not encompass all human hope." Ratzinger explored various aspects of this subject in books, speeches, and homilies throughout his career, from his years as a theology professor to his tenure as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and most recently as Pope Benedict XVI. This is the only book that collates all of his most significant works on political themes inside one volume.
265 pages, Paperback
Published June 27, 2018
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About the author
Pope Benedict XVI
943 books935 followersOriginally
Joseph Ratzinger
, a noted conservative theologian before his election in 2005, Benedict XVI strove against the influence of secularism during his papacy to defend traditional Catholic teachings but since medieval times first resigned in 2013.
After Joseph Ratzinger served a long career as an academic and a professor at the University of Regensburg, Pope Paul VI appointed him as archbishop of Munich and Freising and cardinal in 1977. In 1981, he settled in Rome as prefect of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith, one most important office of the Roman curia. He also served as dean of the college of cardinals.
Benedict XVI reigned 265th in virtue of his office of bishop of Rome, the sovereign of the state of Vatican City and the head of the Church. A conclave named him on 19 April 2005; he celebrated his inaugural Mass on 24 April 2005 and took possession of his Lateran cathedral basilica of Saint John on 7 May 2005.
Benedict XVI succeeded Saint John Paul II, predecessor and his prolific writings on doctrine and values. Benedict XVI advocated a return to fundamental Christian values to counter the increase of many developed countries. Relativism denied objective truth and moral truths in particular; he viewed this central problem of the 21st century. With the importance of the Church, he understood redemptive love of God. He reaffirmed the "importance of prayer in the face of the activism" "of many Christians engaged in charitable work." Benedict also revived a number and elevated the Tridentine Mass to a more prominent position.
Benedict founded and patronized of the Ratzinger foundation, a charitable organization, which from the sale of books and essays makes money to fund scholarships and bursaries for students across the world.
Due to advanced age on 11 February 2013, Benedict announced in a speech in Latin and cited a "lack of strength of mind and body" before the cardinals. He effectively left on 28 February 2013.As emeritus, Benedict retained the style of His Holiness, and the title and continued to dress in the color of white. He moved into the newly renovated monastery of Mater Ecclesiae for his retirement. Pope Francis succeeded him on 13 March 2013.
(more info on Ratzinger Foundation: https://www.ewtn.com/library/Theology...)
After Joseph Ratzinger served a long career as an academic and a professor at the University of Regensburg, Pope Paul VI appointed him as archbishop of Munich and Freising and cardinal in 1977. In 1981, he settled in Rome as prefect of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith, one most important office of the Roman curia. He also served as dean of the college of cardinals.
Benedict XVI reigned 265th in virtue of his office of bishop of Rome, the sovereign of the state of Vatican City and the head of the Church. A conclave named him on 19 April 2005; he celebrated his inaugural Mass on 24 April 2005 and took possession of his Lateran cathedral basilica of Saint John on 7 May 2005.
Benedict XVI succeeded Saint John Paul II, predecessor and his prolific writings on doctrine and values. Benedict XVI advocated a return to fundamental Christian values to counter the increase of many developed countries. Relativism denied objective truth and moral truths in particular; he viewed this central problem of the 21st century. With the importance of the Church, he understood redemptive love of God. He reaffirmed the "importance of prayer in the face of the activism" "of many Christians engaged in charitable work." Benedict also revived a number and elevated the Tridentine Mass to a more prominent position.
Benedict founded and patronized of the Ratzinger foundation, a charitable organization, which from the sale of books and essays makes money to fund scholarships and bursaries for students across the world.
Due to advanced age on 11 February 2013, Benedict announced in a speech in Latin and cited a "lack of strength of mind and body" before the cardinals. He effectively left on 28 February 2013.As emeritus, Benedict retained the style of His Holiness, and the title and continued to dress in the color of white. He moved into the newly renovated monastery of Mater Ecclesiae for his retirement. Pope Francis succeeded him on 13 March 2013.
(more info on Ratzinger Foundation: https://www.ewtn.com/library/Theology...)
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August 13, 2024
Faith and Politics collects a series of essays, homilies, and speeches with Joseph Ratzinger—Pope Benedict XVI—that provides a helpful introduction to his political and social thought. Ratzinger covers a lot of territory in these essays, which touch on biblical exegesis, the political theology of Saint Augustine, freedom of conscience, relations between Church and state, and natural law in pluralist societies. In each of them, Ratzinger demonstrates his subtly as a thinker and his perceptive grasp on the contested place of Christianity in the public sphere, especially in liberal democratic societies. Contrary to common misapprehensions, Ratzinger is not some neo-medieval Christian theocrat. Quite the opposite: trained as an Augustinian, he is one of the foremost defenders of the separation of Church and state, each of which has authority in its distinct domain. At the same time, Ratzinger insists that Christianity can and should be a “positive force in politics” although “without usurping the political sphere” (cf. Ratzinger, Church, Ecumenism, Politics, 203).
The essay in which Ratzinger treats the aforementioned themes most clearly is “Truth, Values, Power: Touchstones of a Pluralistic Society.” In the third part of the essay, Ratzinger introduces a dilemma at the center of contemporary debates within (liberal) political philosophy. On the one hand, he observes, relativism of a certain sort is an ostensibly necessary precondition of democracy. As he explains, “We do not want the state to impose one particular idea of the good on us. . . . Truth is controversial, and the attempt to impose on all persons what one part of the citizenry holds to be true looks like the enslavement of people’s consciences” (133). For this reason, relativism in the political sphere is an essential postulate of freedom, especially freedom of religion and conscience. On the other hand, Ratzinger notes that liberal democracy posits a certain set of inviolable rights and liberties not subject to the whims of a democratic majority. If truth were simply a matter of majoritarian consensus, then a majority could revise or entirely dispense with fundamental human rights as it saw fit (this, by the way, is precisely John Rawls’s concern as well and directly informs his first principle of justice). As such, liberal democracy seems to presuppose what Ratzinger calls “a nonrelativistic kernel” that underwrites the bevy of rights and liberties the state must protect as its foremost duty. As such, “a basic element of truth, namely, ethical truth, is indispensable to democracy” (134).
What, then, is the basis for this ethical truth and the fundamental values—the dignity of the human person, political equality, freedom, justice, etc.—that derive from it? To what normative standard can citizens in a pluralist democracy appeal, one that its citizens can reasonably endorse as authoritative for all insofar as it concerns their shared lives with one another?
This may well be the fundamental question in political philosophy in the wake of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. Ratzinger is careful not to offer a decisive answer to this question but rather helpfully sketches several possible answers that fall somewhere in between what he calls “the relativistic theory” advanced by philosophers like Richard Rorty and “the metaphysical and Christian thesis” advanced by (among others) Jacques Maritain and Vittorio Possenti. Per the first theory, the sole criterion for justice (and, by extension, what constitutes law) is the widely held convictions espoused by the majority of citizens. Truth is effectively what we the citizens say that it is. Per the second theory, Christianity is the source of truth for democratic politics. The basic presumption behind this theory is that the truths that underpin liberal democracy are, at bottom, Christian truths intelligible to all by the light of reason (as is probably obvious, this second theory posits a robust conception of the natural law).
Importantly, Ratzinger points out that the evidential quality of these (Christian) truths has come into question in late modernity and postmodernity. In post-Christian cultures, the basic principles of Christian morality—or more precisely, of the natural law—are not “obvious to all and incontrovertible” by sheer dint of reason (144). Given this crisis in practical reason at the sociopolitical level, it seems as if the values on which democracy is founded are best affirmed by means of a “moral faith” and not justified by an appeal to reason. In a pluralist society whose citizens do not agree about “the pure insights of reason,” the moral principles that underwrite fundamental rights and liberties cannot be truly justified or discussed. “In the end, one must make a decision about them,” a decision that is not unlike a leap of faith (145).
Ratzinger does not entirely endorse this position, which he attributes to Karl Popper, and asserts that “the spectrum of acceptable theories” extends from Maritain to Popper. “Maritain has the greatest confidence in the rational evidential quality of the moral truth of Christianity and of the Christian image of man [sic],” he explains. Popper, on the other hand, “exemplifies the least measure of confidence, but this minimum is just enough to ward off a collapse into positivism” (146). Whichever theory one ultimately runs with—I myself find Popper a bit more realistic on these points, if only at a descriptive level—Ratzinger insists that “in order to establish a meaningful and viable ordering of life in society, the state requires a minimum of truth, of knowledge and of the good, that cannot be manipulated. . . . The state is not itself the source of truth and morality” (147). As such, the state must receive from “outside” itself this minimum of truth, and Ratzinger normatively associates this “outside” with “a reason that has come to maturity in the historical form of faith”—i.e., reason as nurtured by and tutored within the life of the Church.
Thus, while the Church “may not exalt herself to become a state, nor may she seek to work as an organ of power in the state or beyond the state boundaries,” the Church “must exert herself with all her vigor so that in her there may shine forth the moral truth that she offers to the state and that ought to become evident to the citizens of the state” (148-149). This, then, is the positive model for relations between the Church and state that Ratzinger defends. It is a model in which the Church plays an active role in public life but does not in any way wield the temporal sword. Whatever pressure it exerts on policy decisions is entirely moral, born from its efforts to bear witness to and instruct civil society in the truth.
The essay in which Ratzinger treats the aforementioned themes most clearly is “Truth, Values, Power: Touchstones of a Pluralistic Society.” In the third part of the essay, Ratzinger introduces a dilemma at the center of contemporary debates within (liberal) political philosophy. On the one hand, he observes, relativism of a certain sort is an ostensibly necessary precondition of democracy. As he explains, “We do not want the state to impose one particular idea of the good on us. . . . Truth is controversial, and the attempt to impose on all persons what one part of the citizenry holds to be true looks like the enslavement of people’s consciences” (133). For this reason, relativism in the political sphere is an essential postulate of freedom, especially freedom of religion and conscience. On the other hand, Ratzinger notes that liberal democracy posits a certain set of inviolable rights and liberties not subject to the whims of a democratic majority. If truth were simply a matter of majoritarian consensus, then a majority could revise or entirely dispense with fundamental human rights as it saw fit (this, by the way, is precisely John Rawls’s concern as well and directly informs his first principle of justice). As such, liberal democracy seems to presuppose what Ratzinger calls “a nonrelativistic kernel” that underwrites the bevy of rights and liberties the state must protect as its foremost duty. As such, “a basic element of truth, namely, ethical truth, is indispensable to democracy” (134).
What, then, is the basis for this ethical truth and the fundamental values—the dignity of the human person, political equality, freedom, justice, etc.—that derive from it? To what normative standard can citizens in a pluralist democracy appeal, one that its citizens can reasonably endorse as authoritative for all insofar as it concerns their shared lives with one another?
This may well be the fundamental question in political philosophy in the wake of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. Ratzinger is careful not to offer a decisive answer to this question but rather helpfully sketches several possible answers that fall somewhere in between what he calls “the relativistic theory” advanced by philosophers like Richard Rorty and “the metaphysical and Christian thesis” advanced by (among others) Jacques Maritain and Vittorio Possenti. Per the first theory, the sole criterion for justice (and, by extension, what constitutes law) is the widely held convictions espoused by the majority of citizens. Truth is effectively what we the citizens say that it is. Per the second theory, Christianity is the source of truth for democratic politics. The basic presumption behind this theory is that the truths that underpin liberal democracy are, at bottom, Christian truths intelligible to all by the light of reason (as is probably obvious, this second theory posits a robust conception of the natural law).
Importantly, Ratzinger points out that the evidential quality of these (Christian) truths has come into question in late modernity and postmodernity. In post-Christian cultures, the basic principles of Christian morality—or more precisely, of the natural law—are not “obvious to all and incontrovertible” by sheer dint of reason (144). Given this crisis in practical reason at the sociopolitical level, it seems as if the values on which democracy is founded are best affirmed by means of a “moral faith” and not justified by an appeal to reason. In a pluralist society whose citizens do not agree about “the pure insights of reason,” the moral principles that underwrite fundamental rights and liberties cannot be truly justified or discussed. “In the end, one must make a decision about them,” a decision that is not unlike a leap of faith (145).
Ratzinger does not entirely endorse this position, which he attributes to Karl Popper, and asserts that “the spectrum of acceptable theories” extends from Maritain to Popper. “Maritain has the greatest confidence in the rational evidential quality of the moral truth of Christianity and of the Christian image of man [sic],” he explains. Popper, on the other hand, “exemplifies the least measure of confidence, but this minimum is just enough to ward off a collapse into positivism” (146). Whichever theory one ultimately runs with—I myself find Popper a bit more realistic on these points, if only at a descriptive level—Ratzinger insists that “in order to establish a meaningful and viable ordering of life in society, the state requires a minimum of truth, of knowledge and of the good, that cannot be manipulated. . . . The state is not itself the source of truth and morality” (147). As such, the state must receive from “outside” itself this minimum of truth, and Ratzinger normatively associates this “outside” with “a reason that has come to maturity in the historical form of faith”—i.e., reason as nurtured by and tutored within the life of the Church.
Thus, while the Church “may not exalt herself to become a state, nor may she seek to work as an organ of power in the state or beyond the state boundaries,” the Church “must exert herself with all her vigor so that in her there may shine forth the moral truth that she offers to the state and that ought to become evident to the citizens of the state” (148-149). This, then, is the positive model for relations between the Church and state that Ratzinger defends. It is a model in which the Church plays an active role in public life but does not in any way wield the temporal sword. Whatever pressure it exerts on policy decisions is entirely moral, born from its efforts to bear witness to and instruct civil society in the truth.
October 6, 2018
Of course, it is five stars - it is Ratzinger. So good and the published debate with an atheist at the end is just excellent.
August 16, 2020
Excellent collection of essays, speeches and debates. Ratzinger shows a unique mind that carefully addresses the issues in politics.
June 13, 2019
Four stars instead of five because there’s much less on politics than the title of the book might suggest.
Of course there are still many interesting teachings and if it comes from Pope Benedict, it’s certainly worth reading.
Of course there are still many interesting teachings and if it comes from Pope Benedict, it’s certainly worth reading.
December 9, 2019
Great book to read now, specially now (2019) when the country is so divided. His ideas are much like those of the founding father of the USA—expressed way more theologically.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews